End Times Christians keep looking for signs and portents

By Diane Roberts | –

( Florida Phoenix ) – Remember when a quarter of Americans thought Barack Obama might be the Antichrist?

They feared he’d impose a One World Government — as Dr. Peter Venkman says in Ghostbusters, “a disaster of biblical proportions, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together” — and trigger the apocalypse.

That didn’t happen, but End Times Christians keep looking for signs and portents, wars and rumors of wars, and, by God, the Israel-Hamas horror is right up their millenarianist alley.

Where many of us see the vicious killings by Hamas and the indiscriminate bombing by the Netanyahu government as atrocities fueled by 75 years of resentment, fear, rage, and oppression, as well as a radical Islamic refusal to accept the existence of Israel, evangelicals and the politicians beholden to them see the first quarter of the Second Coming.

Evangelicals subscribe to a self-serving vision of Israel, one in which Jews demonstrate the inerrant truth of the Bible just by living there. They believe they have to go through Jews, who must have a nation state with Jerusalem as its capital, to spark the return of Jesus.

“Last Judgment Fresco Cycle by Frederico Zuccaro and Giorgio Vasari.” Public Domain.

When he was in office, Donald Trump and his MAGA maniacs were glad to play along, upending 70 years of U.S. policy, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy there and boasting that he did it for the evangelicals who voted for him in huge numbers.

Getting to the End of Days requires Jews to rebuild Solomon’s temple on the ruins of the first two — the original, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and the second version, wrecked by the Romans in 70 AD.

Holy offering

But before the bulldozers toll in, they need a red cow.

No cow, no temple; no temple, no Second Coming.

The End Times can’t kick off ’till a perfectly red heifer with not one white (or black or any other color in her fur) is brought to Jerusalem.

Then the poor critter will be slain by a priest, burned on a pyre made of cedar and hyssop with a piece of scarlet thread. Her ashes will be mixed with water and used to purify the Children of Israel.

It’s unclear how many American politicians accept the literal truth of this, but waiting for, even trying to jump start, Armageddon has animated the history of Protestant white folks ever since they landed on Plymouth Rock.

Doomsday is ironed into our culture.

The Puritans colonized the northeast corner of what became the United States expressly to build themselves a New Jerusalem and welcome the Second Coming, a catastrophe they felt certain would happen any minute now.

Doomsday sects have flourished throughout American history, from the Millerites of the 19th Century to the Branch Davidians to James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s notoriously pro-pollution, anti-environment Interior secretary.

Watt figured there was no reason to save the planet when the Lord was going to show up soon and deliver a new heaven and a new earth.

So why not drive that big car and crank up that AC?

Jonesing for the End Times

According to the Pew Center, 60 percent of evangelicals think we are living in the End Times. A Texas preacher, one of Donald Trump’s pet pastors, responded to the Hamas assault on Israel by praying, “The last days are coming and are here, when you will come again, for your church and for your people.”

This kind of thinking, plus Americans’ perennial Islamophobia, gives cover to the rightwing politicians hollering themselves hoarse about reducing Gaza to rubble and never mind the dead children.

The excitable senior senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, told CNN, “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages.”

Hamas must be “eradicated,” and if there are thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties, well, it’s their own fault for living in Gaza — not that Israel lets people leave Gaza.

Republican and Democratic politicians are all trying to outdo each other in assuring their voters that they stand with Israel and condemning anyone who suggests that the Netanyahu government — bellicose at the best of times — should share a least a little of the blame for the death toll.

Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib admittedly jumped the gun in blaming Israel for bombing the hospital in Gaza, and practically everybody in Washington demanded she apologize.

Tlaib is a Palestinian American: Her take on Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians is bound to be different from her Christian and Jewish colleagues.

Right now, nobody’s inclined to accept alternate points of view. When Tlaib called for a ceasefire to allow food, water, and medical supplies into Gaza, and perhaps help get the hostages out, the reaction was, if anything, worse.

Along with Ilhan Omar, the only other Muslim woman in Congress, she and her family are now regularly being threatened with violence.

Outdoing each other

Trump, Republican presidential frontrunner and cult leader, is gleefully throwing gasoline on the fire. To make up for calling Hamas “smart,” he’s now promising that when he’s reelected he’ll restore his ridiculous Muslim ban, institute “ideological screening” for immigrants, and refuse to admit refugees from Gaza.

Attempting to revive a campaign on life-support, Ron DeSantis is jumping up and down squawking “Me, too!”

Sen. Rick Scott, another towering intellect, is pitching a hissy fit over the administration’s $106 billion omnibus bill funding U.S. border security, Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza.

Scott, Trump, Rubio, and DeSantis all claim to love Jesus.

Non-wingnut Christians frown on collective punishment, guilt by association, and indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants, but End Times folks are OK with all of that, interpreting the horrific conflict between Israel and Hamas as fulfilment of biblical prophecy about a last battle on the plain of Megiddo — the site of the coming Apocalypse and also a nice national park in northern Israel.

Wholesale destruction, vicious battles, lots of dead people — that’s all part of the End Times package. Prominent Baptist minister Robert Jeffress assures Evangelicals the war in Israel is “not a human struggle; it is a spiritual struggle against the forces of darkness.”

According to Jeffress, “Satan set his sights set on Israel from the very beginning.”

You might not hear quite such theological disaster-mongering from MAGA Republicans, though Marco Rubio keeps tweeting dire Old Testament verses, like this gem from the Prophet Joel: “The day of the LORD is coming! Yes, it approaches, a day of darkness & gloom, a day of thick clouds! Like dawn spreading over the mountains, a vast & mighty army!”

Clearly the New Testament is just a little too kumbaya for him.

One problem

But there’s a problem — if you’re Jewish, that is.

Evangelicals and other Republicans proclaim their love of Israel and Judaism and “God’s Chosen People,” but they don’t like to talk the end game of the End Times.

Once the fake messiah ruling the world from the rebuilt temple gets whipped by Jesus and his angel army, the Jews are going have to convert to Christianity.

If they don’t, it’s the Lake of Fire for them. Forever.

But for now, it looks like Israel’s authoritarian-leaning, strife-ridden governing coalition — not people likely to start haunting their local Methodist church — will accept their deal with the devil.

Make nice with the Christians, reap political benefits.

There’s no way most Democratic politicians will alienate the American Jewish vote: They need it.

There’s no way most Republicans want to piss off either the Jews who support them or, more importantly, the Evangelicals who own them.

If the apocalypse comes before Benjamin Netanyahu either gets voted out or convicted of corruption, well, he can probably try and cut a deal with Jehovah and move to a nice little suburb in Gehenna.

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.

 

 Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Florida Phoenix

The Jordanian parliament condemned the Israeli storming of al-Aqsa as an act of “state terrorism.”

Both inside Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank, Palestinians held rallies and marches to protest the attacks.

Israeli officials falsely characterize these retreats at al-Aqsa as the faithful “barricading” themselves in the mosque, which makes an act of humble piety sound like a military maneuver. As usual, they accuse Palestinians of being terrorists, having weapons, etc. There is no evidence for this propaganda, and lots of evidence against it. When the Israeli troops made their incursion, all the helpless Palestinians could do was set off some fireworks to try to stop it.

The reason the Israelis don’t want Palestinian worshipers to carry out overnight retreats at al-Aqsa is that they want to let militant Israeli cultists into the Muslim complex at dawn every day for the next week. So they are expelling Muslims from a mosque for the sake of far right, extremist Jews who are horning in on this Muslim holy site.

All of this is shameful in international law, but it is also very, very dangerous. In fact, the Israeli encroachments on the sacred al-Aqsa mosque are some of the more dangerous actions now being taken in the world.

On February 22, 2006, al-Qaeda or some similar group blew up the golden-domed Askariyya Shrine in Samarra, Iraq. The shrine is sacred to followers of the Shiite branch of Islam, since it is associated with the Twelfth Imam and his father, Hasan al-Askari. For Shiites the Twelfth Islam is a bit like Jesus for Christians, a holy figure who was transported into another, spiritual dimension from which he will one day return to institute apocalyptic changes on earth before the Judgment Day. The explosion that brought down the golden dome of the shrine killed no one. But it set off an orgy of Sunni-Shiite violence that kicked off a civil war in Iraq through 2006-2007. Some months as many as 3,000 people were killed.

Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia who was advising the Iraqi Kurds in that era, observed that it was the most deadly act of terrorism in history that killed no one. All the deaths ensued afterwards because of this assault on a spiritually meaningful, iconic building and the way it fed into sectarian feelings. I fear most US personnel in Iraq at the time did not know the significance of the Askariyyah Shrine, which they tended to call a “mosque.” A mosque is a place of worship analogous to a church or synagogue; a shrine is a holy place, often dominated by the tomb of a saint, that one visits for blessings.

There are a handful of really important shrines in the world. There is the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. There is the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. There is the Maha Bodhi Buddhist Temple at Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. Also, say, the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa in Tokyo. For Hinduism, you have, e.g., the Vishwanath Temple at Varanasi (Benares) in India.

The three most important shrines in Islam are the Kaaba in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina, and the al-Aqsa Mosque Complex atop what Jews call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Photo of al-Aqsa Mosque by philippe collard on Unsplash

The al-Aqsa Mosque complex is in big trouble, and that makes 1.8 billion Muslims deeply unhappy, even angry.

Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to the edges of paradise from that spot (in 617 CE?).

Muslim armies negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem in 636 or 637. At that time, the Temple Mount had been abandoned for hundreds of years, under Roman rule, and Jews had by law been banned from Jerusalem. It was the Muslims who gradually let the Jews back into the city after half a millennium. In 705 the Muslim empire erected the al-Aqsa Mosque, as Islam had begun to emerge as a religion in its own right. Because of its association in people’s minds with the ascension of the Prophet, it was considered a holy site. Muslims often stopped off there to worship on their way to Mecca on pilgrimage, all through the succeeding centuries. Except for a brief period during the medieval crusades, Muslim states ruled Jerusalem until World War I, when the British defeated the Ottoman Empire and established the Mandate of Palestine, which in 1939 London promised would become the independent state of Palestine for Palestinians by 1949.

Instead, the 600,000 Jews the British admitted to their Mandate or colony of Palestine, against the wishes of its 1.4 million Palestinian inhabitants, engaged in a struggle both against the departing British and against neighboring Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt to establish a Jewish state, in which they succeeded in May 1948. Some 740,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and forever exiled from their homes and farms in what became Israel. Some live in refugee camps to this day.

In 1967 Israel seized East Jerusalem, with its solidly Palestinian population, and so put the al-Aqsa Mosque under Israeli military occupation. It is occupied the way the 400,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem and environs are occupied.

Far right wing and millenarian Jewish movements would very much like to tear down the al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple on the Temple Mount. There is, by the way, no archeological evidence that the place so called was the site of Solomon’s temple. It is just a folk belief. There are many disputes about where exactly the Second Temple stood, but Israeli archeologists have concluded that the al-Aqsa Mosque does not stand within the area of the ancient Temple.

Nevertheless, far right wing Jews of the sort now being coddled and enabled by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have a plan for the al-Aqsa Mosque complex. They would like to take over part of it for regular Jewish worship. But that would mean frequently barring Muslims from worshiping at al-Aqsa, for Jewish “security.” Of course, as noted above, some would like to demolish the al-Aqsa entirely.

The thing that stands in the way of these plans is that the holy places in Jerusalem are governed by a kind of compact among religious groups called the “Status Quo,” which Israel had agreed to observe.

The UN reported last year,

“The Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine said that a few days ago, Israeli occupying forces stormed the Aqsa Mosque compound/Haram al-Sharif, shooting at worshipers and desecrating the mosque with military boots and violence. He pointed out that 200 Palestinians, including women and children were wounded and 400 arrested, yet Israel claims it is upholding the historic status quo.

Not only does Israel use security to justify killing Palestinian children on their way to school, it labels Palestinian worshippers as terrorists, he continued. Jewish extremists and settlers are not merely visiting Haram al‑Sharif, but are seeking a takeover. Israel has no authority over Haram al‑Sharif where the historic and legal status quo must be upheld, he said, adding that the occupying Power is also targeting the Palestinian identity of the city.”

By the way, the extremists have also been attacking Christian churches and sites and would clearly like to drive the other religions out of Jerusalem. Their supporters are now in the Israeli cabinet.

Republican senators whose lives were at risk that day, have accused President Joe Biden of “politicizing January 6,” most notably Lindsey Graham. Biden has not politicized the riot; rather, Graham and the flock are trying to mask the political and religious justification for same. Biden has called out those who tried to turn a perfunctory certification process into a coup d’état, and “resurrect a failed presidency.” They have it all backwards again. Graham characterized the push for voting rights legislation as, “a federal takeover of state-run election systems.” They’ll mischaracterize anything to stir the unwashed and unread masses into a riotous frenzy.

The role of religion in America has evolved to a disturbing state, considering a tenant of the Founding Fathers was “freedom of (or from) religion.” While one segment of America is trying to make the rioters into martyrs and heroes, the legal sector of all levels of government is prosecuting them for their involvement. Fake news is at risk of becoming fake history – according to Smithsonian curators Jon Grinspan and Peter Manseau. Objections to teaching Critical Race theory in public schools are a symptom of right-wing and Christian Nationalist attempts to re-write history. Descendants of plantations owners who twisted the Bible as a justification for slavery, are now planning other violence “in Jesus’ name,” for the benefit of Donald Trump.

In her 1951 essay, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hanna Arendt noted, “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements . . .” No human force makes people more gullible than religion. Trump’s effort to destroy democracy is abetted by numerous Evangelical pastors, who view him as a modern day King Cyrus II of Persia. Mike Pompeo tried to portray Trump not as King Cyrus, but as Queen Esther, valiantly saving the Jews from Iran! Has there ever been a more cynical misapplication of religion to justify evil? Republican Jews buy into this because it gives them cover for dismissing the claims and history of Palestinians. According to the Book of Isaiah 45, G-d chose King Cyrus II of Persia (600–530 BC) to liberate the Jews from bondage in Persia. A competing Biblical myth is that Queen Esther conned King Xerxes I into letting her people go about 100 years later.

Prof. Hamid Dabashi of Columbia noted in an Al-Jezeera article, “Some evangelicals, who support Zionism out of the belief that the Jewish migration to Israel would trigger the Second Coming have eagerly elevated Trump to the status of a biblical ruler. He, in turn, has happily obliged and made a number of political concessions to Israel, out of the rather worldly consideration that the evangelical vote could win him re-election next year.”

Throughout history religion has been used to unite, divide, manipulate, and punish people. My standing to discuss this? I’m a rabbinical school reject, having been told to “apply your considerable talents and abilities elsewhere,” when I applied to Hebrew Union College (HUC). The role of religion in government is troublesome. Israel is a Jewish nation, as it was founded by Jews for Jews in response to 1000 years of government-sanctioned persecution in Europe, and the Fascist-inspired Holocaust. But Israel is an ecumenical nation, as the home to precious sites for Islam and Christianity.

Though the United States was founded by mostly Christians, a guiding principle of the founding fathers was freedom FROM religion, in response to the persecution and dictates of the Anglican Church, and the power it wielded through the British Crown. Somewhere along the way, many Americans dispensed with the founding fathers’ “freedom FROM religion” concept when it suited their agenda.

Evangelical Republicans were angry at President Barack Obama for actions that offended their agenda – opposing the Defense of Marriage Act, allowing birth control in government health insurance plans, supporting gay marriage and flying the Rainbow flag over the White House. Subsequently or consequently, they welcomed Trump as their Savior from Obama, and have tried to elevate him to Biblical status. How blasphemous can you get? In that selfish, twisted context, Evangelicals saw Trump’s moral failings (brutal racism, sexism and cruel agenda) as humanized traits of an anointed leader. Now we have hypocrisy heaped on top of blasphemy, but so what? After Trump was elected, Evangelical leaders throughout the US declared Trump to be a Savior for a nation led astray by Obama. But unlike King Cyrus II, Trump didn’t liberate Jews to build the Second Temple, and has made numerous anti-Semitic comments, while conning Republican Jews into forgetting the dark side of Evangelical “love” for Israel – namely that it involves Apocalyptic visions of a world without Jews. Either we’re all being converted or going to hell. When people argue about who loves Israel more or who loves Jesus more, it can never be good. This creates a slippery, subjective threshold for good, not good enough and bad.

We expect integrity and consistency from our spiritual leaders. As a rabbinical school reject, I’ve never been one to suffer phony rabbis. I call them out! I’ve had a lifelong dialectic with the rabbi who gave me Bar Mitzvah training, and is considered an icon in my hometown. When Southern Baptist, Moral Majority leader Rev. Ed McAteer went on TV in the 1990’s to declare that, “G-d doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews,” that rabbi called him out loud and clear in a Friday night sermon. But two years later, he honored the SAME Rev. Ed McAteer as a “Friend of Israel” during a Temple event. When I challenged the rabbi on that, he gave me a dirty look, “turned” his back and walked away. He didn’t enjoy being reminded that the Evangelical “love” for Israel is dependent on their apocalyptic vision for a world without Jews.

One of the most profane abuses of religion occurred when Donald Trump donned a kippah (yalmuke) and made a campaign appearance at the sacred Western Wall of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem – “The Wailing Wall.” Here was the modern day King Cyrus USING one of our most sacred sites as a campaign prop, with the blessing of PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Lance Wallneau is the American Evangelical leader who “anointed” Trump as the modern day Cyrus II. In the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy, produced by Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University he argues, “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” who will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.” Because Christian Nationalism is predicated on some deeply twisted ecclesiastic concepts, it is toxic.

Religion and nationalism has been a toxic mix for centuries. Their current nexus in American politics may be the most direct threat to American Democracy in the history of the Republic. Christian Nationalist leaders have conned their flock into believing that any news source not vetted by the Christian Right is not credible. The fervor of the January 6 insurrection was fueled by false claims of Christian persecution and oppression. Anything contrary to their belief system and political agenda is considered a lie and evil force that must be defeated. Thus, overturning the 2020 Election results assumed the tenor of a manufactured Holy War. This is what we’re up against.

The failed July 15 coup in Turkey has generated a whole range of debates on who was really behind the coup, Turkey’s future relations with NATO and the U.S., and President Erdogan’s possible pivot to Russia and Iran. A more serious debate that did not receive much media attention is the intra-Muslim debate – the controversies between the Muslim modernists and the Muslim traditionalists concerning the coup. The Turkish media are reporting the debates over the “Gulenist treason” illuminating whether or not Fethullah Gulen and his supporters, who are branded Muslim modernists, used or misused Islamic belief and ideals to orchestrate the coup, and for what end results.

Turkish theologians with modernist leanings point out that the Gulenists, who are part of the mainstream Sunni tradition in Turkey, believe in some kind of messianic rule – in a notion like the advent of Imam Mahdi at the end of times to revive justice worldwide. To many of his supporters, Gulen is the messiah, and their attempts to capture state power were linked up to this belief. The Gulenists had also opened up interfaith dialogue with the Christians and a number of Jewish organizations to promote exchange of ideas and cooperation across religious boundaries, an objective other modernists have often advocated.

traditionalists, in contrast, offer a diametrically opposite explanation about Gulen and his movement. They see the Gulenists as deviants from the mainstream Sunni tradition, as their social and political goals closely resemble the reformist agenda of the nineteenth century modernists, principally Sayed Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) and his Egyptian disciple Muhammad Abduh (1849 –1905). As reformists, the Gulenists hardly hold on to the “pure” Sunni creed of Islam. Furthermore, the traditionalists consider modernist, rationalist theology as heresy, pure and simple.

Although quite old, the debates between modernists and traditionalists continue to immensely dominate Islamic philosophy and theology which, in turn, influence contemporary Muslim political and social activism. It may be of interests to briefly look at the issues at stake in the debates between the two rival Islamic camps.

There are three significant elements the Muslim traditionalists emphasize: i) the sacred religious texts – the Qur’an and the Hadiths (sayings and practices of Prophet Muhammad) are eternal and timeless; ii) Muslims’ salvation lies in their firm belief in and hold onto the guidelines contained in the sacred texts, and organizing their social and political systems accordingly. There is no need for rationalist theology or rationalist pursuit of knowledge, which the secular Western countries follow, outside the boundary of the sacred texts; and iii) a binary division of the world into Dar al-Islam (zone of peace) and Dar al-Harb (zone of conflict) that draws a dividing line between Islam and non-Islam.

Note that such a division of the world has no broad Islamic support. The Hanafi School of Islamic jurisprudence referred to such dual categorizations while the three other Sunni schools of jurisprudence – Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanbali — saw it as a temporary issue. Neither the Qur’an nor the Hadiths has any particular sanctions for an Islam versus non-Islam typology.

Muslim modernists, on the other hand, put forward alternative ideas and visions to help the Muslims adapt to changing times and realities. They argue that Islam is an all-embracing ideology with a sense of purpose, a distinct community identity and a set of moral and ethical rules to organize Muslim community life. What is needed is the scientific pursuit of knowledge to improve Muslim life qualities and to open up the avenues of interactions with non-Islamic civilizations to promote productive mutual understandings. Islam does not prohibit the rationalist or scientific pursuits of knowledge, and the binary division of the world is obsolete, crafted only to hinder civilizational interactions and progress across diverse faith traditions. Muslims’ salvation lies in a modernist approach to spurt progress to arrest their economic and political decline, which explicitly started with the abolition of the Ottoman Empire in early 1924 followed by European encroachments in and domination over the entire Mideast.

Differences in theological or philosophical visions and interpretations notwithstanding, the Muslim modernists as well as the traditionalists share a common objective – the capture of state power. Their lust for state power is common, though the methods they employ to capture power are diverse. The original idea for state power came from Ibn Taymiyyah, a thirteenth century Sunni theologian and scholar with strong roots in the Hanbali School of Islamic jurisprudence. Ibn Taymiyyah argued for the force of the law, rather than individual virtues of the rulers, to protect original Islam. In other words, Islamic Faith must be backed by state power, for state power is essential to implement and defend Islamic belief system socially, politically and culturally. State power is also a safeguard against foreign intruders like the Mongol invaders who converted to Islam but misinterpreted the Faith to cling to power.

The Gulenists attempted to seize state power through a military coup, a process largely facilitated by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP won electoral verdict first in 2002, having no strong support base in the army, bureaucracy and other state organizations. Under pressures from the secular Kemalists, the AKP forged an alliance with Fethullah Gulen whose supporters gradually replaced the Kemalists in all important power bases in Turkish politics, what eventually overwhelmed President Erdogan giving him a bitter wake-up call through the July 15 abortive coup.

The Muslim traditionalists have more resorted to direct wars or revolutions to achieve their political goals. Back in 1932, the bond between the Al-Saud dynasty and the religious fighters of the Sunni Wahhabi tradition created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through the sword. Late King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud organized a powerful tribal army to crush his opponents in the Arabian Peninsula – Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca, who conspired with the British during World War I to drive the Ottomans out of the Arab Middle East, and Saud ibn Rashid of Jabal Shammar, a tribal state in the central Najd region of present-day Saudi Arabia.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini was an exception in that he captured power in 1979 through a religious revolution backed by popular support. Though it is difficult to definitively say whether Khomeini was a traditionalist or a modernist (since he emphasized strict adherence to Islamic Faith and was also open to scientific pursuit of knowledge to modernize the Iranian society), he set up a precedent – not only Marxism-inspired proletariat but also religiously motivated mass people can successfully carry out revolution, even by defying the hegemonic power of the time. Khomeini’s revolution succeeded in legitimizing state power in the name of Islam; it gave Iran some sort of a new ideological and political identity, what he called “neither East nor West, the Islamic Republic” – an alternative to Eastern socialism and Western liberalism.

The radical traditionalists, grouped under al-Qaeda and the ISIS, have preferred the outright use of force against their local and foreign opponents – who are respectively branded “near enemy” and “far enemy”. ISIS is bent on reviving the Islamic Caliphate, modelled on the original Islamic State Prophet Muhammad established in Medina in the first half of the seventh century, though it remains uncertain whether it can survive the war Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi initiated against the whole world in the summer of 2014. They remain more wedded to the radical thinking of Egyptian Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb who labelled the West a jahiliyya (ignorance of Divine Guidance) and advocated jihad to dislodge the forces of jahiliyya from the Middle East.

Whatever methods the Muslim modernists and traditionalists use to achieve their ultimate goals, that is, state power to protect Islam, the debates between them appear an endless process. We can expect the debates to surge often, at least occasionally, in the volatile Middle East region.

Dr. Mohammed Nuruzzaman is Associate Professor of International Relations, Gulf University for Science and Technology, West Mishref, Kuwait

E-mail: nuruzzaman.m@gust.edu.kw

Research Webpage: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohammed_Nuruzzaman

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

TRT World: “A Failed Coup: From the eyes of journalists​”